Naturally, alot of topics have been covered already, but what I also have picked up on are some individual quotes that I have found particularly interesting.
Yesterday on day 2 Andy said “It’s better to be done than perfect” which I thought was a fantastic bit of advice.
I am particularly into this myself as I have recently studied perfectionism as my dissertation. Perfectionism, generally speaking, is a negative trait. People with perfectionism have more problems with depression, anxiety and confidence.
Having a perfectionist mindset could therefore be negative for your mental health in the Data School if you aim to be perfect at all aspects of your learning, which simply is not possible.
Andy mentioned that it was important not to be perfect when you don’t have much time to visualise something, ie a client project. Andy has also demonstrated this need not to be perfect by saying things such as “you want the width between the bars to be about half of the bar width, but don’t measure it exactly”. If you did, that would just be wasting precious time.
This mindset may differ from when our cohort applied to Data School. We may all have shown perfectionistic tendencies when trying to make our visualisations as good as possible. I can remember how much I spent trying to learn lots of calculations, but if I was rushed for time this would not have been possible, and I would have ended up with essentially nothing to present.
This will also be useful for something like Dashboard Week, which looking at previous blogs seems to be quite stressful!